Wessington Springs herald. (Wessington Springs, Aurora County, Dakota [S.D.]) 1883-1891, 1887-05-20

| look ut the book; it is a bad book. "Where
did you get it?" II borrowed it." Alas,
there are always those abroad who would
like to loan your son and daughter bad
book. Everywhere, everywhere an I'M
clean literature. I charge upon it the de-
struction of 10000 immortal, souls, and /
bid YOU this morning wake up to the mag
nitude of the theme. I shall take all the
worlds literature-good novels an bad,
travels true and false, histories faithful
and incorrect, legends beautiful and mon
strous, all tracts, all chronicles, all cpl
logues, all family, city, State, and national
libralies-and pile them up in pyramid
of literature and then shall bring to bear
upon it some grand, glorious, infallible,
unmistakable Christian principles. God
help me to speak with reference to my last
account and God help you to listen.
| charge you, in the first place, TO stand
of human life. Life is neither tragedy
nor farce. Men are not all either knayes
or heroes. Women are neither angels nor
furies. And yet, if you depended upon
much of the literature of the day you would
get the idea that life, instead of being
something earnest, something practical, is
a fitful and fantastic and extravagant thing.
How poorly prepared are that young man
and woman for the duties of to-day who
spent last night wading through brilliant
passages descriptive OF magnificent knavery
and wickedness! The man will be looking
all day long for his heroine i'll the tin shop,
by the forge, in the factory, in the count
ing-room, and he will not find her, and he
will be dissatisfied. A man who gives him
self up to the indiscriminate reading of
novels will be nerveless, inane, and a
nuisance. He will be tit neither for the
store, nor the shop, nor the field. A wo-
man who gives herself up to the indiscrim-
mate reading of novels will be untitled for
the duties of wife, mother, sister, daughter.
There she is, hair dishevelled, countenance
vacant, cheeks pale, hands trembling,
bursting into tears ut midnight over the
| fate of some unfortunate lover; in the day
time, when she ought to be busy, staring
finger nails into the quick. The carpet,
that was plain before, will be palmer after
having wandered through romance all
night long in tesselated halls of castles.
And your industrious companion will be
moe unattractive than ever now that you
have walked in the romance through parks
with plumed princesses, OF luunged in
the arbor with the polished desperate. Oh,
these confirmed novel readers! They are
untitled for this life, which is tremendous
discipline. They know not how to go
through the furnaces of trial through which
they must pass, and they are untitled for q
world where everything We gain we achieve
by hard, long continuing, and exhaustive
work.
Again: Abstain from all those books
which. while they have some good things
i about them, have also on admixture of
evil. You have read books that had two
elements in them-the good and the bad.
Which stuck to you? The bad! The heart
of most people is like a sieve, which lets
the small particles of gold fall through,
but keeps the great cinders. Once in a
while there is O mind like tombstone,
which, plunged amid steel and brass fill
ings, gathers up the steel and rerels the
brass. But it is generally just the oppo-
site. If you attempt to plunge through a
hedge Of hurrs to get one blackberry, you
will get more burrs than blackberries.
You cannot afford to read bad book,
however good you are. You say: "The
the scratch of n pin has sometimes pro-
duced the lockjaw. Alas, if through curl
osity. as many do, you pry into an evil
book, your curiosity is as dangerous as that
of the man who would take q torch into a
gunpowder mill merely to see whether it
would really blow up or not. In a
menagerie in New York a man put his arm
through the bars of black leopard's cage.
The animals hide looked SO sleek. and
bright, and beautiful. He Just stroked it
once. The monster seized him, and he
drew forth hand torn, and mangled, and
bleeding. Oh. touch not evil, even with
the faintest stroke! Though it may be
glossy and beautiful, touch it not, lest YOU
pull forth your soul torn and bleeding
under the clutch of the black leopard.
"But," you say, chow can I find out
whether book is good or bad without
reading it," There is always something
suspicious about bad book. never knew
an xception-some,hing suspicious in the
index or style of illustration. This Venom
GUS reptile almost always carries warning
rattle.
Again: 1 charge you to stand off from
all those books which corrupt the imagina-
ton and intlame the passions. I do not
refer now to that kind of a book which the
villain has under his coat waiting for the
ways to see that there is no policeman
around the block, offers the book to your
son on his way home. do not speak of
that kind of literature, but that which
evades the law and comes out in polished
style, and with acute plot sounds the toe
sin that rouses up all the baser passions of
the soul. To-day, under the nostrils of
this land, there is fetid, reeiling. I'M
washed literature enough to poison all the
fountains of public virtue and smite your
sons and daughters as with the wing of q
destroying angel, and it is time that the
ministers of the Gospel blew the trumpet
and rallied the forces of righteousness, all
armed to the teeth, in this great battle
against depraved literature.
Again. abstain from those books which
are aDOlOpotic of crime IT. is n aad fhin0